Hello,
The text-shadow property suffers from an important limitation, a
degradation problem, when you set the text-color to be the same as the
background color, and set a shadow. The effect can be seen here, in the
fith and sixth examples ("I, Augustus" and "a cat, an apple, etcetera"):
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/text-shadow.html
When "color" and "background-color" are the same, and the author relies
on a shadow to show to make the text readable, the text becomes
unreadable on browsers that do not support text-shadow.
In this particular case, a simple solution can solve the problem : being
able to specify the shadow and the color in the same rule. Let's say the
acceptable value for text-shadow becomes something like that :
none | [<color> /] [<shadow>, ] * <shadow>
The following rule :
text-shadow: black / white 0 0 5px;
Would be equivalent to
color: black;
text-shadow: white 0 0 5px;
Thus, either color and shadow are set, or the rule is wholly ignored.
Actually, the same thing has already been proposed long ago in a
previous mail, that got no reaction :
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0088.html
Though this mail proposed a slightly different syntax (a comma
separating the color from the shadows instead of a slash), it is the
same proposal.
Regards,
Jordan OSETE